The popularity of social media has grown rapidly in recent times. For example, a few years ago social media was considered an esoteric novelty, used by only a few early technology adopters. In contrast, today the rate of content generation for the social media service provider Facebook alone exceeds one billion messages per day.
This explosive growth trend has caught the advertising industry substantially off guard. As a result, many in the industry are not able to effectively and advantageously utilize this rich new resource of user-generated content. For example, television shows are still judged by metrics such as television rating points, which fail to account for differences in viewer engagement levels from one show to another. As a result, less than optimal decisions are made regarding which television programs should be maintained, which should be cut, at what time the programs should be disseminated to the viewing audience, and the prices that should be charged for the commercials.
Accordingly, an opportunity exists for developing new techniques to more effectively evaluate and analyze audience engagement levels for various televised content. The need exists for a system and methods that overcome the above problems, as well as provide additional benefits. Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related system and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other shortcomings of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.